Mobile Widget Architecture

Driven by the vision that mobile computing devices will constitute the vast majority of the near future computing devices, new technology and frameworks arrive to facilitate the creation of highly interactive mobile web applications. Those applications are called rich internet applications. This thesis concentrates on a subset of those. Namely the internet enabled widget. Widgets are small computer applications that perform a single task and lowers the threshold of knowledge required for creating them. As the evolution of technology and internet use proceed, this leads to a number of rivaling technologies and more or less obsolete devices. This thesis investigates the realization of widgets on devices already considered to be of a past generation. Such a widget system consisting of a mobile widget engine and a server side engine can be more or less isolated from contemporary widget enabling frameworks. This thesis highlights the suitability of using the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for constructing both widgets as web resources and addresses the contrast between the original large system, of internet scale, use of REST with its adoption of comparatively small scale widgets